Project Description

The main goal of this project is to provide a very easy and powerful free tool to backup and restore
Hyper-V virtual machines, in standalone and clustered (CSV) environments, overcoming all the limitations that a generic tool like Diskshadow provides.

This tool targets Windows 2008, Windows 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012. All the corresponding
core and free Hyper-V editions are also supported!

There are quite a few expensive commercial solutions on the market supporting this scenario, but this is the first open source one, based on the research we did before publishing the project.

We integrated this tool in our datacenter's production environment management infrastructure, which means that it undergoes continuous testing in a real world environment :-)

HVBackup can be invoked from the command line, scripted with
Powershell or integrated in any .Net program through it's class library.

The backup process generates a separate zip file for each virtual machine in the specified output directory, containing all the files owned by the VM and identified for backup by the VSS Hyper-V provider.

Requirements:

.Net Framework 3.5, which can be easily enabled on the command line.

Windows Server / Hyper-V Server 2012, in Powershell:

Install-WindowsFeature NET-Framework-Core

Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2 (non core):

ocsetup NetFx3

Windows Server (core) / Hyper-V Server 2008 / 2008 R2:

ocsetup NetFx3-ServerCore

Alessandro Pilotti
MVP ASP.Net / IIS

Usage samples

HVBackup -a -o c:\backup

Performs a full VSS backup (using the HyperV VSS writer) of all VMs on the host.

HVBackup -l "VM1,VM2" -o \\yourserver\backup

Performs a full VSS backup of the provided list of VMs (use quotes if the names contain spaces).
In this sample the output directory is on a remote server.

HVBackup -f list.txt -o c:\backup

Performs a full VSS backup of the VMs names provided in "list.txt", one per line.